”What man’s head would do is always defeated by his scrotum.” Edward Dahlberg’s aphorism came back to me as I watched The Things We Do at the Odyssey Theater. Written by Grant Woods, who was Arizona’s attorney general in the 1990s, the play deals with the impact of an adulterous love affair on two middle-aged Los Angeles couples. Restaurateur Bill (Blake Boyd) has been married for a long time to Alice (Liesel Kopp). They are reasonably happy despite “having grown apart” over the years, owing mostly to her New Age interest in yoga and vegetarianism. But they hang in there as a couple until he meets and is bowled over by Sara (Marlene Galan), a real-estate agent trying to sell him a house in Malibu. Sara is also free-spirited and sexually emancipated; or, as she puts it, “a European trapped in La-La Land.” It doesn’t take her long to seduce Bill and turn him on to wild and kinky sex. This she does while being married to Ted (Stephen Rockwell), a nice but dull chap. As the affair continues to heat up, Bill and Sara think they might be falling in love with each other. To assuage their guilt—and avoid being thought of as villains—they conceive of a plan to try and get Alice and Ted to fall for each other. Much of the comedy in The Things We Do follows from that, with the strait-laced Alice and Ted fighting the temptation to have sex even as they realize how compatible they are. Director Elina de Santos orchestrates their relationship in deft, sensitive fashion, catching all the nuances of thwarted passion. This contrasts sharply, of course, with the uninhibited sex scenes between Bill and Sara (which also come off as comic). The humor disappears when the truth emerges about the affair—and hurt, betrayal and change are the painful result. de Santos must be credited for the way she has handled Woods’s play, given it a style that suits it: light, understated, minimal. She has also used snatches of pop song in an effective way. Best of all, she has coaxed excellent performances out of the four-person cast. Their acting combined with Woods’s intelligent writing make The Things We Do well worth seeing.
